Virtual Digital Marketing Manager

Can I Be Frank? It’s Staggering How Many Business Owners Are Just Pissing Their Money Up The Wall On Digital Marketing!

Your business should be getting a 2-3 times return on investment for every penny you spend on digital marketing.

But I bet you are not.

Do you even know what return you get on your marketing budget?

Do you know which 20% of your marketing brings you 80% of the results?

If your answer is “no”, or “I’m not sure” to any of those questions, you have a problem.

Your marketing spend – digital or not – should be an investment, not an overhead (and most of my clients typically enjoy 2-3 times “return on investment” within the first 12 weeks.

Yes, for every £1 or $1 spent, you should be enjoying a MINIMUM of two-three times that coming back in to your bank account.

But take a look at where most companies place marketing in their Profit & Loss statement and you’ll see where they are going wrong. Apart from hiring people who are about 12 to do their social media and who, quite frankly, don’t know what they are doing.

90% of the time Marketing is listed as an overhead with no expectation of a return (profit) on marketing spend.

Worse, because it’s thought of as an overhead, it’s a fixed budget so even if the company does well, they are always seeking to minimise the marketing budget rather than scaling it up to bring more sales.

The more money you invest in your marketing, the larger your return on that investment should be.

The same applies to time. More time = larger return.

Here’s a shocker! Most companies don’t even track which of their marketing activities bring the biggest return on investment.

But what if that doesn’t have to be the case?

Spending for no return is just plain not good business sense. Not measuring your marketing effort is just business suicide.

Unless you are really lucky and something works despite your ignorance, you’ll never know if your marketing machine is a well-oiled, ideally automated moneymaker, or a rusty old heap of junk.

Time to hire someone who knows what they are doing?

You have two choices on this one. You can hire me as a Consultant, for shorter projects.

Or for projects likely to last more than 3 months, you can hire me (& my team) as your Virtual Digital Marketing Department.

A traditional, full-time Digital Marketing Manager working on site can certainly help your business. But you probably can’t afford one right now. Maybe you can’t even afford a Social Media Manager?

Maybe you can afford both, but you don’t have room for anyone else working in-house right now? Or you are scared to make the commitment to bring someone in on full salary (with all the Human Resources and Legal implications).

Regardless, there are several big benefits to hiring the virtual counterpart.

Firstly, they just less expensive. Remuneration is flexible, you can work on full retainer basis or pay a pre-agreed retainer and a percentage of uplift.

(We work on a sliding scale, the smaller the retainer, the bigger the percentage of uplift and vice versa).

There’s no risk of an idle employee being paid every month regardless of whether they are doing anything, much less doing anything effective.

There is no desk, computer or extra coffee to buy. They don’t go on holiday (or if they do, they arrange for your marketing to roll on regardless) and there are no pension payments to make. Even if they get sick, they are highly incentivised to keep working and often outsource a lot of the repetitive jobs, so the marketing wheels keep turning.

They’ll also pay for their own ongoing professional training to keep up to date with their knowledge and skills!

They care more because they are self-employed rather than congratulating themselves that they’ve landed a nice cushy job that it’s very hard for you to remove them from if they don’t perform.

A Virtual Digital Marketing Manager (vDMM) will hit the ground running because they have something to prove, fast.

You get what exactly what you want to pay for – results.

The vDMM is paid with no ceiling on earnings, so they are highly motivated to work hard for your business. To be thinking about your business marketing all the time, coming up with no ideas and things to test.

It will also save your existing management team valuable time. If there’s no marketing expert on your team, the duties are probably split up. This makes for an unreliable, unfocused marketing effort, much less anyone coming up with new ideas.

The expertise of a vDMM will ensure that you spend money in the right places for maximum gain.

Any business will benefit from a focused, reliable, experienced, marketing execution.

A few more benefits worth mentioning:

• A focused vDMM can often reduce unnecessary marketing spend
• Perfectly measurable results
• External & fresh view of the business
• More defined and focused marketing strategy – what to focus on in the short, medium and long-term.

What does a Virtual Digital Marketing Manager do, exactly?

A vDMM fulfils all the duties of an in-house Digital Marketing Manager, remotely.

Think of how VA’s (Virtual assistants) have often replaced PA’s (Personal assistants) and how many companies now how outsourced accounts and even virtual Finance Directors.

So you’ll get someone to create (with you) and then take ownership of your marketing plan – from start to finish.

And this for 20-70% less money than a traditional Digital Marketing Manager.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

If you’re not keen on the idea of remote workers, you could hire a vDMM until you have the budget for a £50,000 – £120,000 salary in your team.

But you’d still be foregoing the wider benefits of a vDMM.

A vDMM brings a wider variety of skills and experience with him. A traditional vDMM might have worked for a few companies, but a vDMM has most likely worked with many more – in different industries. They will bring fresh ideas to the table.

The skilled vDMM can perform – or recruit, train and supervise a team of outsourced professionals from overseas – a variety of tasks, including:

Should the vDMM not have the above skills, you can bet that they’ll have connections to other experts in the relevant fields. They will often be paying members of Masterminds where they can get the best minds working on your marketing challenges (anonymously of course).

Are you actually ready for a Virtual Digital Marketing Manager?

The best time to hire a vDMM would probably be last week.

Opportunities pass us by every day and your lack of a vDMM could be costing you opportunities. That said, a vDMM is still an extra expense. And you will have to pay for the advertising they want to test.

So we’d only suggest going down this road if:

• Your business is generating between £20K – £50K per month, or are on target to generate that within the next 12-24 months.

• You’ve got a strong sales process i.e. if we put 10 new qualified prospects in front of you you’d be able to convert 50% or more of them into paying customers

• You have a product (or range of products) that you sell and the profits on the “front end” best sellers exceed £100 or more

• You can allocate at least £2000 per month budget towards marketing

• You have a small team of people working in the business, and one of them is a dedicated virtual admin, process or marketing person to help execute on marketing tasks (or you’re open to using your vDDM’s existing team)

• You are a published non-fiction author, expert in your industry, you have a large audience you want to monetise further, you provide B2B/professional services and/or run an existing B2C online business that you want to scale up.

• You value content publishing and understand the importance of building a brand and profile over time

• You don’t expect miracle results overnight. Marketing is an investment and on average it will take up to 12 months to see positive results based on specific experiments, consistent effort, measurement and tweaking along the way.

Sound like a Virtual Digital Marketing Manager might be a good fit for your business, and curious to find out more?